Antipwn

I’m going to start off with a couple of caveats. Firstly I’ve only got to level 20 and so I’ve not yet tasted PvP or any of the higher level content. Secondly this isn’t intended to be a review of Aion so much as a discussion of the design. I’m not going to tell you whether I think you should buy this game or not, there are plenty of places to look for that kind of advice if you don’t have the ability to figure it out for yourself.

So, Aion then. A game that has the luxury of being a newly released game without many of the normal problems that plague newly launched software. No inexplicable crash bugs, no memory leak that the dev team swear they fixed in beta, no unforeseen balance changes in the live patch and so on.  Let’s start at the beginning.

Character creation is comprehensive in the extreme. Although there are only two races, the diversity of characters makes it seem a lot more varied than that. You can play about with an almost ridiculous number of sliders, presets and tone palettes. Customisation is a theme throughout the game that is taken very seriously. Most gear can be customised in a variety of ways. Not only do you have the usual dye options that other games allow but you also have a morph option that allows you to use the stats from one item and the art from a different one. Which is a superb idea. You can also tweak stats to a limited extent through socketing manastones into armour and weapons. Control over the appearance of a character is an important part of any RPG and NCSoft have clearly taken the decision to give the player as many tools as possible to handle that. Aion is a very visual game and the character is at the literal and figurative centre of that experience.

If the visuals are cutting edge then the gameplay is definitely not. There is some nice use of cut-scenes to introduce character story and to communicate background. A few quests also use cut-scenes for dramatic effect which is nice. However almost all of the quests you’ll get are very simple ‘kill ten [things] and bring me their [body part]‘ or simple fedex quests. Questing is thus very repetitive indeed. Combat is identical to every other DIKU variant out there, mash buttons until one of you runs out of hit points. Aggro ranges are typically very small and monsters give up chasing after a relatively short time so kiting is hard. Abilities come slowly as is generally the case and you’ll find that it will be a while before your combo chains are viable or you get access to pretty vital tools like roots, stuns etc.

Abilities are learned from books as you go up levels, you don’t automatically gain new skills when you level up. Your existing skills do get better but you need to purchase a skill book for any new skills you might be able to learn. This is good in a way because it means you can purchase the skill books in advance and carry them with you, thus saving you a trip back to town and interrupting whatever you might be doing at the time, on the other hand of course it means that if you’re broke, you can’t gain new skills until you’ve earnt some more cash.

Cash is an area that seems to suffer from some schizophrenic design. A player will earn a lot of money from questing and looting, however the game monetises everything. Your inventory and vault are laughably small to begin with and expanding those costs money. Learning a craft costs money, learning skills or spells costs money, transport around the world costs money and then of course there are costs for consumables, gear upgrades and other NPC services. Crafting is a huge cash sink until the very highest levels. Gold sellers will make a fortune out of this game. There are other economic decisions that don’t seem to make sense, you can have a private store for example where you sell items to passing players. This effectively turns your character into a stationary merchant, thus interrupting your play while your store is open. There is an auction house system too but I’m not convinced that forcing players to afk while selling is a good idea.

For a game that has wings as one of its USPs, the number of places that don’t allow flight is disconcertingly large.  Gliding is a fun mini-game in it’s own right but there are too many places early on where flying is prevented.

Crafting is another AFK activity. While crafting your UI is largely disabled apart from chat functions, you simply queue up your jobs and go and make a cup of tea or something. If you enjoyed copying Amiga games back in the day and love to watch bars moving across the screen then crafting is engrossing and fulfilling, for the rest of us, not so much. All crafting is recipe based (and guess what? You need to buy recipes!) and there are usually several levels of production to go through before you can turn raw materials into actual useful items. This is an idea that DAoC had in the original crafting system and wisely scrapped after a while. Let me say that again; a terrible crafting system dropped this feature because it was a bad idea. There is no good reason why anyone should be copying anything from that system, let alone a feature that was dropped because it was too horrible even for DAoC crafting.

The game is visually stunning, uses current technology well and yet, it could have been designed back in 1999 as far as the game mechanics are concerned.